


Look Alive

by Notsohappycamper



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Angst, F/M, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-17
Updated: 2015-11-24
Packaged: 2018-05-02 01:06:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5228030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Notsohappycamper/pseuds/Notsohappycamper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The struggle of a new life and a new love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“Look alive,” Stephanie warned, and Hancock chuckled and gave a smirk that made her want to carve her own heart out so he could grind it up and inject it into his veins like a chem.

“Easier said than done, sister.”

She cocked her gun and quietly grinned at the self-deprecating ghoul joke, not because she wanted to - hell no, there were raiders in front of them, nothing about that was funny - but because she honestly couldn’t help it.

The admission would never leave her lips in his presence, but that was probably the thing she admired about Hancock the most, though there were many things she admired. That easygoing, joking attitude, that loose grip on life. The man could make a joke out of anything, life and death itself.

She’d be pretty surprised if, when Hancock died, he didn’t go out with a smile on his face.

“Oh, you just made the biggest mistake of your life,” he growled at a bruised-up raider who was charging straight at Stephanie with a machete.

His head exploded so close to her, pieces and bits of skull sliding to the ground at her feet, she could almost smell Death itself.

*

“I’d like to stop by Sanctuary to check up on Dogmeat, if that’s okay with you.”

Hancock smiled and crossed his arms. “Cool with me. You really love that mutt, don’t ya?”

An image of Dogmeat popped into her head: his playful, panting face, the red bandanna around his neck, those little goggles she wrestled around his head sometimes when they went into dusty buildings or when bullets were coming in from every direction and she just wanted to be extra careful. He always resisted those goggles going on his eyes, shaking his head and nipping at her fingers in protest, but once they were secured, he didn’t seem to mind them at all.

“Yeah,” she mumbled from the heart, wistful and fond. “I really do.”

She watched Hancock idly strike a match and light a cigarette from the pack she’d found and tossed his way earlier that day. “You ever think you wanna take him out again?”

The question was as casual as Hancock’s existence itself, but it made Stephanie pause like she had heard the beeping of a buried mine near her feet.

“Well. Maybe. I mean... We’re still going strong as partners, right?” she asked, awkwardly stumbling to string a sentence together. She mentally kicked herself in the ass for being so weird about something that should be so simple.

“Oh, yeah. I’m stickin’ with ya as long as you can bear me,” he joked back, instantly defusing the awkward tension that was forming a cloud in Stephanie’s mind.

She secretly hated that he could do that. He always made her feel so comfortable with almost no effort at all. By just being himself, really. So damn charismatic.

“I don’t know,” she joked back now with a smile, at ease and bending over to stick her hand in the pocket of a rotting corpse by the side of the road. “There’s just something about you I can’t seem to stand.”

Hancock paced in front of her and coughed out a laugh. “My startling good looks, maybe?” His fingers not wrapped around the cig twirled the knife he kept strapped to his side. It still had Finn’s blood crusted all over it.

She watched him for as long as he flipped that knife around, sunlight reflecting off the blade and shining in her eyes, and when he tucked it back away, she answered. “Something like that.”

He shook his head and turned, taking off and mumbling something about her darling pooch being so heartsick without her, but she didn’t miss the way the corners of his mouth turned up.

She followed at his back, letting their positions be reversed just this once, and stared at the sunlight beaming down on all three corners of his black hat.

*

Dogmeat was a bundle of slobber and joy when he spotted her closing in on his doghouse.

She cupped his face and scratched at his ears, cooing to him and asking how he was doing, as he peered up into her face with big, brown eyes and happily licked her chin. Hancock lingered a few feet away, leaning against an old, Pre-War house and watching the happy duo catch up with each other.

After dog cuddles were over, when she led him into her little metal home in Sanctuary, she couldn’t help but feel a bit self-conscious at the little shack. She’d built the place herself after all, with help from a few other settlers. Put up the walls and anchored on the low roof. Set up a light switch by the door with the help of a conduit and generator, which was literal hell for her to get working properly.

However, the first things Hancock did when he stepped into the small house after her and closed the door were briefly give the place a look over, make a beeline for the couch, and prop his boots up on the ottoman in front of it.

Simple as that.

She stood by the door and watched as he tilted his head back and sighed out so heavily it was as if he was exhaling all the stress and exhaustion that had accumulated over the few days of fighting and half-sleeping in various odd spots from Diamond City to Sanctuary Hills.

When he flipped on the radio resting on an end table beside the couch and unpocketed a jet, she excused herself to the bathroom - or to the little walled off area she liked to call a bathroom.

The music of Diamond City drifted through the shack, playing a song she’d heard far too many times and yet still couldn’t help but hum along to. “I’ll hold you close and kiss those radiation burns away. Crawl out through the fallout, baby....”

She hummed and mumbled the lyrics to herself as she looked into the mounted mirror by the broken toilet she had scavenged. Those lyrics had always reminded her of Nate when she first heard them... It was almost impossible for them not to.

Somewhere along the way, though, somehow, the painful feelings associated with them begin to blur into other than heartbreak. Now, as she hummed them, she felt light. She felt free.

She was different now. A lot different. She almost didn’t recognize herself when she gazed into the cracked mirror.

She’d gotten a new haircut in Diamond City, one Hancock said suited her more. “Unladylike” she thought John, the stylist, had called it. Chin length on one side and shaved on the other. Bleached it dirty blonde to replace the old natural brown.

She’d stared at her reflection for several minutes after that cut and dye job, wondering who that wild-looking woman in the mirror was. ‘What would Nate say to this hair?’ she’d thought, heart-achy and bitter-sweet. She hadn’t dyed her hair since high school, a year before college, back in her late teen rebellion days. Back then, it was a deep, dark crimson.

Hancock had looked her up and down right there at the salon- she saw him do it; he wasn’t as slick as he thought he was - and just nodded in approval, like she was finally complete.

It had been quite a while since she’d thawed out, long months of roaming and struggling to stay alive, killing and almost being killed, and hell, she’d been partnering with Hancock for about two weeks and counting. This is who she was now, whether she liked it or not.

That woman in the mirror with short, dirty blonde hair, a pale scar going through her right eyebrow, a weary, skeptical look in her eyes. That was her. She knew this, of course she knew this, but every single time she saw her reflection in something, she had a increasingly hard time dealing with that fact.

“...I’ll love you all your life, although that may not be too long. Crawl out through the fallout, baby...”

Sighing and worrying at a section of hair, she stepped back into the cramped main room, immediately noting Hancock’s closed eyes and the five empty jet containers on the floor by the ottoman.

“Easy Living” came on the radio next and filled the room with its soft instruments and gentle vocals - “...And I’m _so_ in love... There’s nothing in life but you...” - and she wondered if the entire universe was against her right now.

A strong sense of lovely domesticity rose like a raging Deathclaw and slapped her right in the face. The kind of domesticity she felt back when Nate and her bought their first house together on Sanctuary Hills.

Warmth flooded her cheeks as she shrugged off her backpack on the table by the door and sunk down onto the couch beside Hancock. He shifted, but otherwise stayed silent and motionless.

Stephanie tapped her foot to the nervous mumbling of the DJ, waiting impatiently for the next song to come on as her mind raced. Why did this situation make her feel so weird, she wondered. It’s not like she doesn’t know Hancock; yeah, she didn’t know the guy inside and out yet, but they’d traveled together for weeks, took turns and swapped beds when only one was available, bled together, and killed together.

She had injected psycho once, just once, when a rifle almost ripped right through her leg, and she knew that Hancock would praise her about it for hours, but she never took any more drugs just to make him smile like that again. The guy wasn’t on some holy pedestal for her or anything. That’s not the way she worked in relationships. It was mutual admiration, mutual respect, or it was no-go.

She knew Hancock saw her as an equal, just as she saw him, and it was pure comfortable companionship up to this point. No blushing, no dancing around each other, no giving fake laughs to his jokes or coyly twirling her hair or touching his arm or any courting practices at all. It’s been all blood and drugs and sweat and bullets.

So why, just why, did she now all of a sudden feel like her heart was going to combust within her chest and cause a second nuclear fallout.

The quiet? The warmth?

The sight of Hancock on her couch, lean form all stretched out and relaxed, chest rising and falling slowly. Soft music playing from the radio, and the faint smell of chemicals in the air. It was just so...

Before she knew it, her hand was on the brim of his favorite tricorner hat, trying to ease it off his head as gently as possible.

It didn’t matter to her why. She honestly just felt like it. And she didn’t make it too far before his eyes drifted open and wandered to her face. Her hand retreated slowly and folded back in her lap, not even trying to make it seem like she wasn’t doing anything.

His dark eyes ran over her face as she averted her gaze and cleared her throat awkwardly, until his lips parted. “Take a hit with me?” An easy question. Simple. Pure.

She found herself staring in his eyes and eventually nodding; not because she wanted to make him smile, but because she wanted to smile with him.

One jet later, they were sitting together and staring at the ceiling as the world slowed to a crawl around them. The radio was like a misty blur of cotton and fuzz to her ears, and she grinned whenever she recognized a song she particularly liked. One of Hancock’s legs was crossed over hers, and she wasn’t quite sure when that happened.

“Mmm, turn it up,” she whispered, referring to the radio.

Her own voice sounded slow as molasses to her ears, and she laughed hard and grabbed for Hancock’s hand in giddiness.

Her mind clearly registered the warm grip he took on her hand, not entwining their fingers, but holding her hand by the palm and slowly, ever, ever so slowly, bending her arm back so that he was holding her hand against the back of the couch. Stephanie sat still and watched it all.

Quickly switching hands, he settled in front of her, angled towards her, and held each hand in his beside her head, arms creating a cage around her. His face hovered close, and his breath whispered across her skin like moth’s wings.

“Hancock,” she muttered, more of a question than a statement. She never would have guessed that something so slowed down could take her so largely by surprise.

He just watched her with heavy eyes and a tense jaw, completely silent. When he began to lean in, it was a sudden, swelling wave to her; a warm, rough downpour of drugs and radiation and desire, all cutting through the fallout in the sky beyond the roof.

One of his fingers idly twirled the wedding band on her ring finger.

“John,” she blurted out, knowing exactly what she was doing when she used that name instead of the famous one he favored. In the back of her hyperactive mind, she remembered it was his actual name, his birth name from before Goodneighbor. He’d told her when they’d stepped foot in Diamond City together, talking all about his brother and his childhood and his ascension to mayor. Something about “impure thoughts”, too, if she remembered correctly.

When that name dropped from her lips, he stopped and looked hard into her eyes.

“Steph,” he simply murmured back, voice deep and rumbling in his chest. Not Stephanie. Never Stephanie.

Before the War, all her life: Stephanie. Not even Nate ever shortened it to Steph...

“God...” was her gasped response, because what could she possibly say to that. His face so close she could see her dazed reflection in the black of his heated eyes. Every ridge of the wrinkled, dead flesh on his handsome face.

‘If he’s this good now,’ she thought as he started to ease that ring up, up, up, slow and daring, ‘I’d kill every human, mutant, animal, and ghoul in Boston to know what he looked like before the drug.’

Drops of rain began to patter on the metal roofing above them. Stephanie’s mind pushed the loud splashes back as the ring slipped over the knob of her middle knuckle.

“You’re high,” she spouted suddenly, gripping his hand tight and halting his progress.

“And you’re high,” was his retort. His hand flexed in hers.

“So? What does that mean?” she blubbered out.

When he let out a heavy sigh, she could taste the chems on his breath as it washed over her face. “Means you need to chill out and get some sleep soon, lightweight.”

And just like that, in the blink of an eye, he was off, leaning back into his side of the couch and putting his feet back up.

Stephanie pushed herself up immediately, feeling dizzy and wired, slightly blissful and mildly bothered. She almost felt ashamed that she was incredibly aroused. Almost.

But she didn’t.

She pushed off her boots, wrestled out of her heaviest pieces of armor, flopped onto her small bed in the corner of the main room, and listened to the thundering pound of her racing heart.

She remembers hearing the radio being clicked off sometime before she fell asleep and the soft sound of footsteps shuffling towards the bathroom. Last thing she heard was the bathroom door close gently.

In the morning, she peeled herself off the bed, he rolled off the couch, and they got all packed and done up and ready to go.

Hancock gave her a nod, thumbing the grip of his assault rifle as they stepped out onto the moist concrete. She kissed a sleepy Dogmeat on both sides of his snout and left a cold brahmin steak in his blue dish beside a bowl of purified water before turning away to leave.

It was a quiet walk to the wooden bridge, past the turrets and the settlers hunched over in guard posts. On the other side of the bridge, she paused and checked her Pip-Boy.

Hancock dug out a smoke from his jacket pocket.

“Hey, Hancock...”

“Shoot.”

“...I was just wondering where we stood.”

Her voice was far too quiet. Too girly, too fragile. The loose smirk he gave her made her want to smoke and shoot up and kill and spend the rest of her short life with him as long as he wanted her.

She played with the wedding band on her ring finger. Nate’s old one was a lead weight from its home inside her pant’s pocket.

“Look around you. That’s where we stand,” he told her. Then he smiled wide and took off walking.

She looked around her, just as he said, and saw her home with her Dogmeat, the love of her life, at her back, a destroyed and ravaged world at her sides, and a man with an easy lull to his step at her front.

Her feet followed suit with her mind after that man, blind to what was in front of him, like her body was being drawn by a thick string and her heart was sewn up in the threads of the clothes on his back.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few drabbles loosely connected, because I have too many ideas.

He told her outside The Castle walls.

Preston was ambling away into the courtyard, after throwing her a smile, thanking her for everything she’d done for the Minutemen, and half-jokingly warning her not to let Hancock make her do something she’d regret.

Stephanie couldn’t keep the grin off her face as she watched her good friend walk away into the castle he’d fought so hard to get and finally had, and maybe that’s why he chose to do it then.

He cornered her and asked her softly if they could talk, then pretty much just spewed his guts like a love-sick 16 year old.

And Stephanie thought it was pretty much the cutest thing she’d heard in her entire life. Well, her new life, that is.

- _“You, Stephanie...” Nate whispered, getting down on one knee, his warm hand heavy in her own. “You’re perfect...”_ -

She asked him if he saw her as more than a friend, even though they both knew the answer to that, and, when he confirmed it with a smile and a few sentences, she couldn’t contain herself, nervous excitement bursting forth inside her.

When Preston walked up to give her a good plan on where to build some extra guard posts, he had to clear his throat at them awkwardly, like a dad watching his daughter with her first boyfriend, and Stephanie all but violently shoved Hancock away from the embrace they’d been sharing.

He stumbled back easily and laughed to the sky as she nodded to Preston’s ideas with a rosy tint to her cheeks.

*

Out in the city streets, after a bloody firefight with some super mutants, she discovered it wasn’t so bad kissing a ghoul. Not like she thought it would be.

They were both panting hard, adrenaline-fueled and high on the smell of gun powder and dead mutants. When she asked if he was good, eyeing the bullet wound on his shoulder, he gave her a quick nod instead of being honest.

It was a challenge picking her way over to him as he reloaded the heavy gun she’d given him a while ago. Blood and bits of flesh and bone were scattered on the floor, the large, green bodies of the mutants piled up in the small collapsing building.

She kicked a decapitated head aside as she reached in her bag for a Stimpak, and Hancock turned and stretched. Turning away to hide the pain on his face, she figured. She would never understand why he always kept pain bottled up and hidden away. It was infuriating how he did that. It’d been happening since the ghouls and his brother in Diamond City, she knew, maybe even before that. She hated it.

Grabbing his shoulder with one hand, turning him around, and using the other hand to ease a Stimpak into his chest, close to the wound, she took advantage of the surprise on his face, boldly leaned forward, and pressed her lips to the corner of his mouth.

It was a warm feeling. Nothing was soft about it at all, rather rough and dry, but it was warm. Her mind equated it to odd, otherworldly and foreign, but nice. Very, very, very nice.

After having made this second-quick observation, she leaned back, avoiding eye contact, and tossed the now empty Stimpak to the floor. The glass syringe shattered on impact.

“Take care of yourself, tough guy.”

He didn’t turn away in embarrassment, like she thought he would, like she had to. When she glanced back, he was staring right at her, a soft smile on his face, head tilted and eyes warm with love.

She couldn’t look for too long without having to turn away again.

*

Her nerves didn’t always get the better of her, she realized now, when Hancock was sitting across from her at what seemed like the smallest table in existence and was eyeing her to his heart’s content.

Their rib-eye steaks were lukewarm, tough, and slightly irradiated, placed on two dingy plates with cracks and stains that would never come out. With two warm bottles of whiskey in front of them, Stephanie thought she could almost pretend they were fine dining somewhere, if she squinted, went outside, and stood upside-down. Something about being in the little, expensive house in Diamond City and hearing footsteps from the market leak through the thin walls kind of soured the romantic illusion, though.

It wasn’t dinnertime at all; not even close. It was 3:00 AM, and she was tired and barely lucid, slumping and relying on her whiskey like it was liquid gold. Hancock’s indulgent comments about how great she was had been going on for a few minutes now, and he showed no signs of stopping from bathing her in love. Not that she minded.

“Really, how’d I ever end up here with someone like you?” he wooed, obviously just as tired and loopy.

She loved them, all those little praises and words of endearment, and they usually jump-started her heart like crazy, but now, under the whiskey and lack of sleep, she just tilted her head and blinked.

“Well, because you’re you.”

It was so simple to her, so obvious, but light reflected in his black eyes when he chuckled after a slight pause and shook his head. “Oh damn. Now that you’ve stolen my heart, what else do you want, thief?”

He was laughing it off, she thought. Brushing off the compliment like he didn’t deserve it.

Determined now, she leaned forward and fixed her eyes on his, making him focus. “No, listen, though. You are... _amazing_. In every way. And I love you. _So_ much. I would do anything for you.”

It wasn’t until she finished ranting, until her words echoed through the room and repeated themselves in her mind, that she fully realized just how much alcohol she’d had. If her cheeks weren’t already flushed, they surely would have burned through her bones and melted her brain.

Hancock just smiled for a long while, looking down at his plate and chewing his food slowly, while her conscience partially crawled out of its inebriated pit and pelted her with stones. This was why she let him stick to all the compliments instead.

He slid away from the table eventually, pushing back his chair and getting to his feet. When he stepped away, she kept her head down and her lips sealed to the rim of her whiskey bottle, until he approached again and pried it out of her hands. He poured its remaining alcohol into a half-empty Nuka-Cola and set it back down on the table after giving it a quick shake to mix.

Then he retook his seat. She struggled with what to say.

“You deserve it,” he told her. “A little somethin’ to help keep you awake, slugger.”

“ _You_ deserve it,” she slurred back instantly. Her hand almost knocked her knife off the table when she reached out to grab the bottle and bring it to her lips. “You deserve everything.”

He smiled softly around the fork in his mouth, quiet and thoughtful.

*

“God... You’re so-”

Leaning forward, she used her lips to steal the words right from his mouth, to cut him off from saying “perfect”, because she knew that’s what he was going to say, and she really didn’t want to hear it right now.

His body pressed back, pushing her harder against the wall.

“Get high with me,” he sighed out onto her face desperately, gripping her lower back as she hugged him close.

“No,” she breathed in response, distracted, but honest. She wanted to be aware for this. She wanted to remember.

It was all happening so fast and she just-

Her hands ran up and down his back as he panted against her neck almost in a frenzy. When one of his hands descended to his pocket to snag a chem, she quickly lifted one of her legs and threw it around his hip, pulling him so intimately close that his hand had no choice but to find its way to her thigh instead.

“ _Fuck_ , let me just- Ah...”

A modified sniper rifle from on top of the creaking bureau tumbled off and almost smacked her right in the head on its way down. It thudded on the metal flooring by her feet, and the sudden noise, like the pop of a molotav, seemed to make Hancock’s fever red-hot all over again.

He groped his way to her backside and squeezed, pulling on her hips and trying to lead her forward in the direction of the single bed in the corner.

Her leg dropped from around him as she willingly stumbled forward, almost tripping over the rifle, still attached to him like glue. “John..!”

“Shit, you’re perfect, you’re perfect, you’re perfect,” he mumbled hotly into her neck before she could stop him. “Just fuckin’ shoot up with me, god!”

The resident of Diamond City living next door banged on the wall with something heavy, and Hancock bucked against her once before chucking the old alarm clock on the bedside table towards the noise.

“Psycho...” it hit her like a solid brick to the face with the smack of that clock against the wall, the word whispered from her lips as soon as it registered to her brain. Psycho. He’d taken psycho. Why in god’s name had he taken psycho.

When the backs of his knees hit the frame of the bed, they both fell onto it, her body thudding down on top of his, and he wasted no time in grabbing her hips again. It was amazing, honestly, everything felt so wonderful, perfect, and god, she was melting with desire, but she pushed herself up and away from him, irritation fueling her glare.

“You took psycho?”

His wild eyes just stared, unfocused and unnerving, into her face, and she had to use all her willpower to keep from slapping him as hard as she could.

“Mentats and jet, my ass! Why the hell are you high on _psycho_?!”

She felt his hands drop from her body and heard him let out a ragged sigh, like he had a right to be irritated and she didn’t. “You really gonna do this to me right now? Really? You, Steph?”

“Oh, shut up,” she spat out childishly. For some reason beyond her, she almost felt like she was going to cry. That little prick at the corner of her eyes; she knew what that meant. The small lump in her throat. Like she was a little girl who hadn’t gotten her way.

This was nothing like what she had planned. Nothing like her dreams, her fantasies. Hancock’s skin was moist with sweat, his grip just a bit too tight, his eyes far too dazed to even focus on her face for more than a few seconds. When he kissed her, he nipped and bit. When he felt her body, he pressed hard like he was trying to memorize her bone structure. He was wired for a battlefield, not a bedroom. He might not even remember this clearly, depending on what other chems were piled on top of the injectant.

Nate had been so soft, so loving, so gentle, so _“Are you ready?”_

“Shut up,” she growled again, clenching the front of his jacket and leaning down. She watched his eyes close in anticipation and thought she’d never seen anything more beautiful. “Shut up...”

His breath was so warm, his tongue thick in her mouth. Hands on her sides, working their way down. He sighed so perfectly when she slid his jacket off his shoulders and tossed it to the floor.

It landed on the rifle and stayed there til morning.

*

“John... I want you to have something.”

“This belong to your old sweetheart? C’mon, you ain’t gotta give me something like this. You know we’re good to go.”

“I don’t have to. I want to.”

“Keep it, Steph. Really. Barely such a thing as marriage left in the world anyway.”

“Hancock, please.”

Nearby Sanctuary, just in front of Vault 111, Hancock tilted his head back and crossed his arms. “Nope.”

Emotion overtook her, and she clenched her fists at her sides, driving the ring hard against her palm. “Just take the damn ring, please,” she grit out, voice breaking in the back of her throat.

She shouldn’t have come back here. Why did she come back here. Curiosity and longing had called her, and she had foolishly answered, looking for some kind of closure. The sharp pain in her chest sure as hell didn’t feel like any kind of closure at all.

“Nah. No way. Not when you’re crying like that,” Hancock said back, much more gently.

She wasn’t crying. Not yet. Her vision was blurry with moisture, but she wasn’t crying yet. She blinked fast so that she wouldn’t have a chance to.

“I’m not-”

And suddenly, like a bullet breaking through armor, her voice cracked hard around a word and a sharp gasp made her chest heave. But she didn’t cry. She bit her lip and continued to meet his eyes in defiance.

He stood silent and frowning, eyes hard and unreadable and so, so far away. So blurry and distant. His image cleared up when she blinked and a fat tear escaped from the corner of her eye.

“Why won’t you... Just- I don’t want this anymore! Please, take it! Just take the damn thing!”

An onslaught of raw emotion ripped through her voice for the first time since they’d met each other. When she shoved the ring at his chest, he didn’t move at all, neither to catch it nor push it away, and it fell uselessly to the ground and rolled near his feet. She closed her eyes tight to avoid looking at it while he quietly bent over, picked it up, and dusted it off.

“...Don’t you dare,” he muttered when he had straightened, and her head snapped up in alarm, wide-eyed, feeling so vulnerable. “Don’t you dare compare me to him like this. If you’ve been doing that up to this point, that shit’s gotta stop. Right now.”

‘I’m not. I’ve never done that.’ was her immediate instinct to blurt out, but then she’d just be lying right to his face if she said that. The biggest lie of her life.

“Now, I get that you never got to say goodbye,” he continued, “Never had time to get over it properly. It’s sad, okay? It hurts so bad that you feel like you’ve got barbed wire in your chest. Like every time you breathe, it just digs in deeper. I know how it feels, ya know? But, I’m telling you...” He paused, reached out to tilt her face up, and forced her to look him right in the eyes. “Steph, I’m telling you. If you don’t get over this soon, it’ll just grow and grow and fester, and you never will. Don’t pull a Hancock and let this shit control your whole life, you got it?”

His hand moved to stroke her cheek, but she reeled back, jerking away like it burned. “Oh, that’s such bullshit! Why are you so special, then!? Why do you get to be so special?! You’re already over your problems! All drugs and jokes and you’re over it, huh?!”

He never told her just how wrong she was.

He had to drag her back, fighting and sobbing, from the entrance of Vault 111, slipping Nate’s ring back into her pocket when she wasn’t looking, while she yelled about how lucky he was, how she just wanted to fucking marry him already, and how hard it was to even kiss him without feeling guilt.

After she calmed enough to walk straight on her own, they set up two spare sleeping bags in her old Pre-War house and camped out side-by-side in the bedroom. He stayed awake until tears stopped carving paths down her cheeks and soaking into the fabric under her head.

*

“I’ll die long before you do, you know.”

She didn’t mean it, but she said it anyway. It hurt so much to her, she could only imagine the way it made Hancock feel. But she said it anyway and hated it.

His mood was betrayed by an empty smile not quite reaching his eyes when he glanced to her.

“Maybe,” he mused. “Hell, who knows when I’ll die? Don’t exactly lead the ‘safest’ lifestyle.”

They were walking down filthy city streets around Goodneighbor: Hancock’s pride and joy. He probably knew these streets as well as the inside of a box of Mentats, but he walked steadily beside her, letting her guide his footsteps.

The early morning sun was hidden by thick layers of fog. Buildings a mere stone’s throw across the street could just barely be made out through the white mist. After Stephanie had stumbled on a rusty can and almost fell over, Hancock had clasped her hand in his own and entwined their fingers, shrugging with a sly smile and suggesting safety first. She had just looked down with a smile of her own and squeezed his hand tight.

Now, after his off-handed joke, silence crept in, riding on the dots of misty water clinging in the air. Stephanie cleared her throat before she spoke to keep pain from collecting in the back of her mouth.

“...Don’t leave me.”

She regretted the words immediately, but they’d been rising in her chest since Nate, since Shaun, since Sanctuary and Goodneighbor and watching Finn die and feeling John’s love burrow into her heart. All the misery and happiness that came with waking up 200 years in a devastated future. She thought she’d probably never get over it, never truly adjust.

“Steph, please,” the ghoul at her side mumbled. His thumb rubbed her index finger. “Don’t even bother thinkin’ about shit like that. We’re alive right now, ain’t we?”

“What’s gonna happen then? When I die?” She forced herself to stare straight ahead, into the fog, into nothing.

There was a pause in which she could almost hear the smile pulling at his lips. She didn’t dare look. “Where you die, I die. Hell if I’m lettin’ you go down without a fight.”

“And if I die of old age?”

“If you ever get to be that old, I would have to fancy I'd lived long enough, too. If you catch what I’m getting at.”

“God, Hancock. Don’t even joke about that.”

A gunshot echoed in the distance, and he untangled their fingers to throw an arm around her shoulder and hug her closer with a laugh.

Though her mind was in deep turmoil, jumbled and worried and stressed, chronically in love, she absorbed the feeling of his body against her with all of her senses, committing it to memory. The world around her became even more of a blur, both of their bodies melting into the white fog until they were damn near walking on clouds.

When he spoke, she heard a smile wrapped loose as a bow around his words.

“Who ever said I was joking?”


End file.
